The picture of the Afghan girl missing her nose instantly reminded me of this photo, a picture taken in 1985 at a refugee camp in Pakistan. The headline for this cover reads, "Along Afghan's War-torn Frontier."This and the picture we viewed in class had me thinking about our discussion of Spivak's question, can the subaltern (as women) speak?
These images certainly invoke feelings of being sorry for the viewer, as well as great frustration. When I see pictures like this I feel the need to look them up and find out the story behind them. Yet although I go in and educate myself about their conditions, I keep coming back to the fact that their culture is determined by their historical social structures, and that I cannot do anything about it.
When I looked up the background information about Aisha's case. It had been said that she was married off into a family that abused her and her sister, treating them as slaves, that they lived in the stable. When she escaped, her husband had hunted her down and cut her nose off, because it was said in that culture, if a women shamed her husband he was said to have "lost his nose."
Later it was said that a fund corporation recognized the tragedy that had befallen her and offered to help her out with the surgery she needed. So in this situation does Time magazine's use of this trope that reveals atrocities in the third world help or hurt the image of the subaltern (as an afghan woman)? It is with this question that Spivak writes the sentence, "White men are saving brown women from brown men." Horrible crimes against humanity such as Aisha's occur everyday in more countries than we would like to know. When nationally recognized magazines use pictures such as this, with headlines asking painful questions of the reader, are they misusing the women's subaltern voicelessness to encourage support for the US war? These covers basically paint a sense of violence that shocks us in the US, but would simply be seen alongside with the everyday horrors of that war torn culture.
My question is similar to those seen earlier in the blog, which is to ask: Where does the voice of the subaltern succeed? What defines the breakthrough of that message?
The question is definitely interesting: Do major magazines like Time and National Geographic have a political agenda when displaying articles like this? I think it really depends on the circumstances. Was America desiring a sort of Afghani involvement in June 1985? Because I don't know. But if so, I wouldn't say it's a stretch to claim that, yes, their was political reasoning behind the time of this article, yes, they are somewhat abusing the oppression of women for a sort of political gain. I would like to think National Geographic has good intentions. And, when you think about it, regardless of their aims, they still do a lot of good as a magazine by revealing these atrocities.
ReplyDeleteMaybe you just worded it strangely, but I'm curious. How can you "misuse" the women's subaltern voicelessness? This seems like abusing something that doesn't exist. If anything, they're first creating a voice for her, and then potentially misusing it. But at least the creation is progress. Maybe that's the "breakthrough" that you question.
Another thing I just thought of, how do articles like these (ones of horrible third worlds) work to increase the "distance" between Americans and third world subalterns, or the elite and the oppressed? This "distance" is Spivak's measuring stick for subalternity. If when reading this we think, wow, this place is so horrible, so different from civil America, aren't we just creating a larger gap? Does this maybe suffocate the subaltern's voice more, make them more subaltern than before? Wouldn't a better voice-giving tactic be to decrease the distance by increasing relatability? Of course, maybe there's no way we could ever give the subaltern a voice that could be deemed "well-represented".
I think in the high-speed, high-bandwidth world we live in today, the subaltern can have a voice, but sometimes the only way they can have a voice is through a third party. There are organizations throughout the world that are dedicated to "raising awareness", and even though National Geographic is a news outlet it does deal in a particular kind of news, namely world cultures. Of course it is impossible for every subaltern voice to be heard--there are simply too many--but nearly every subaltern group or community is represented. The distinction that needs to be made between the use and abuse of the subaltern voice is, I think, control. Does the subaltern, in finding an outlet, have a say over what the audience will receive through the text? In Aisha's case, I would hazard a "yes" to that question. In the case of this haunting National Geographic photo, I would say "no", simply because the subject matter is automatically biasing: her unique eye color is absolutely arresting and immediately stirs the emotions. We don't really have a say anymore about how we feel towards the story because the image remains at the forefront. But knowing National Geographic and their mission, I hardly hold that against them.
ReplyDeleteI see the misuse of the subaltern's voicelessness as the dominant group taking advantage of the fact they cannot speak. Or at least, they cannot speak clearly. I don't know if that is how you saw "misuse," but that is how I took it as. I could definitely see national magazines using their influence on the American public as a forum for their own personal views, but I wonder if that truly does, like you mentioned, hurt the subaltern. It seems to me that it would be very hard to hurt something that may or may not exist enough to get hurt, such as the subaltern voice.
ReplyDeleteQuentin, the point you bring up at the end of your comment is very interesting, but isn't that exactly what the image is trying to do? I agree with you completely that the titles of both of the articles we've seen as a class create distance the way spivak would put it. They imply inherent difference between their culture and ours that just is as if we're more refined, even though I'd argue in some respects America is far from refined.
ReplyDeleteThe image, however, I feel like attempts to get the viewer to see ourselves in Afghani shoes. I think the fact that she the color eyes she does helps alot. Also, if the lack of certain markers that make her clearly not-American also work to get us to see ourselves or I guess in my case my mom, my sisters, my aunts.